Life begins: Candida Crewe

'The number of birthday and Christmas presents I receive is down'

Candida Crewe

12:01AM GMT 05 Dec 2005

The hiatus after 40 means both counting down and casting off to Candida Crewe

Oh, the relief of turning 40, as I did in June last year. Official leave, at last, to be boring. Being by nature a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-nocturnal, unadventurous and exceedingly dull type, I could finally give up all pretence of enjoying the shenanigans of youth and embrace my true, considerably less exciting self.

The novelist Susan Hill told me that even as a child she felt middle-aged. I wouldn't go that far but I wasn't very good at being young. As a schoolgirl, I resented not being allowed to make many very basic decisions. In my teens and twenties, I felt the terrible urgency to go to parties in order to be seen to belong, to smoke, take drugs and get off with boys, but I often didn't enjoy these things - although I was stupid enough to pretend that I did. I felt an unbearable pressure to be popular, thin, successful, not to end up on the shelf. The need my peers and I shared to keep up with one another I found wearing, frightening sometimes, even depressing. But I didn't have the wherewithal, the strength of character, to ignore it. I had some good times in my youth but I was someone on whom they were for the most part wasted. I regret I wasn't better at it.

Some of my friends who were good at it hated their 40th birthdays. I had been anticipating mine since about the age of 32 and it was some consolation that when it came I was in a position to welcome it. It marked the beginning of an era when I could live more comfortably within my (increasingly sagging) skin.

I would not say I am more confident than I used to be, rather I care less. Energies that were expended on networking (socially and professionally), dieting, searching for a soulmate, minding that in many ways I did not conform, have been diverted to more worthwhile pastimes.

These are, chiefly, trying to be a decent wife and mother, friend and citizen, endeavouring to get better at my work, being more ruthless about editing out things that don't appeal (certain fair-weather friends, dull invitations, occasional commissions that don't inspire). I am busier than I have ever been but considerably less frenetic.

Still, before I sound too insufferably smug, it is important to point out the downsides.

For some women 40 to 50 is the unspoken hiatus period when the irrational desire for more babies persists while the body is still able (just) to go ahead, but to do so makes no sense on any level and is rife with all sorts of risk.

I used to go "humph" if builders whistled at me in the street; now, hypocrite that I am, I find it faintly galling that they don't.

The number of birthday and Christmas presents I receive is down by about seven eighths while, conversely, the number I must buy has increased pretty well tenfold.

While I thought that a husband and hitting 40 would be liberation from worries about my weight, I discover that I am as entrenched as ever in the desire not to be fat. While I dispensed with official diets some time ago, I still skip breakfast and for lunch sometimes eat polystyrene (in the form of naturist rice cakes).

So the quest still covertly rages but seems more pointless now than it ever was. I mean, being thin is about wanting to look like Kate Moss, whose thinness is intimately bound up with youth - something I have manifestly passed - and a beauty only a rare few can ever have.

Being the age I am is countdown to cherubic sons morphing into alarming and surly teenagers; countdown to arthritis or Alzheimer's or both; countdown to becoming completely wizened and invisible and then dying.

It can't be said that I relish any of this but, having been so bad at being young, perhaps I don't mind it as much as some (with the exception of the dying bit, I admit). It does give a certain edge to the day and I no longer have to force myself to go to the parties I don't want to go to, to contain for dear life an ever-disobedient stomach, or to swing from chandeliers I never really fancied swinging from in the first place.

'Eating Myself' by Candida Crewe will be published in April by Bloomsbury